With Wall Street suffering financial conniptions, prominent investment firms imploding like neutron stars, and American president George W. Bush organizing a $700-billion bail-out, it feels like the 1980s all over again. What better time to revive a controversial bestseller set during that era in a new incarnation as … wait for it … a Broadway musical.
Yes, you read that correctly: Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street wheeler and dealer who moonlights as a serial killer, is being adapted for the Great White Way. The book, which features extended passages of graphic violence that sparked outrage when it was first released, was made into a movie starring Christian Bale in 2000. Now Variety is reporting that a stage adaptation is in the works:
Development team has just begun the selection process for creatives to pen the score and the book. No timeline has been set for what is envisioned as a large-scale musical.
According to the Variety piece, the current economic climate in the U.S. prompted the producers to fast-track the adaptation, which, if ticket prices for recent mega-musicals such as Mamma Mia! and Spamalot are anything to go by, will be priced far beyond the means of former financiers and bigwigs hit hard by the recent fiscal downturn.
As to the musical’s score, Variety claims that the “sounds of the time” will be a large influence (as if the material wasn’t horrific enough to begin with). This being the case, Quillblog would like to suggest 1980s movie soundtrack mainstay Kenny Loggins to score the new show, and Billy Idol to play the lead role of Patrick Bateman. Next stop: the Tonys.
I’m seeing this as a perfect vehicle for Celine Dion. She’d make a great Patrick Bateman. Do what Blanchett did for Dylan. On Broadway, as on Wall Street, real men like their men butch.